LTF 74: Review & Meditation on Basic Points in the Text & Later Lam-Rims

We have also seen, as our discussion of the text has unfolded (there is no need to go through the outline in great detail again; we have gone through that so many times), that all the major points that we find in later formulations of the path to enlightenment are here in the text in early form. 

There is a discussion of the precious human body. There is a discussion of death and impermanence There is a discussion of cause and effect, karmic cause and effect, and a discussion of the destructive actions of body, speech, and mind and how important it is to avoid those. There is a discussion of all the different types of sufferings and problems that we all face in general, plus a discussion of the specific, individual sufferings of each of the different life forms that we can be reborn in and all the various planes of existence – what’s generally referred to later as the sufferings of samsara. There is a discussion of the disturbing emotions that are the cause of that and a discussion of the mechanism that keeps us in samsara, which is that of the twelve links of dependent arising. There was a discussion of all of those points and of what we need to get out of that. So, we had the trainings in higher discipline and higher concentration – which included all the teachings on how to gain concentration and to avoid the biggest distractions that we get in concentration, which are basically thoughts of desire, sexual desire, for others’ bodies, and how to overcome that – and higher discriminating awareness of reality. 

And when it comes to motivation, there was a discussion, if you recall, of the four immeasurable attitudes of (1) love, (2) compassion, (3) joy, rejoicing in the happy, positive things others have done and not feeling jealous of that, and (4) equanimity, which is having an equal attitude toward everyone. We don’t want only our friends to be happy and not suffer; we also want that for everybody because everybody equally wants to be happy and doesn’t want to be unhappy or to suffer. Suffering hurts for everybody equally; it doesn’t hurt for anybody more than it hurts for others. That is an important thing to keep in mind. 

The text speaks about general advice for laypeople mostly – because the king is a layperson – regarding how to get along with a wife, not to lust after other people’s wives, and these types of practical pieces of advice for a householder, a married man. Obviously, if we were speaking to women, we would reverse the subject. The point is to live a life being as positive and kind as we can toward those that are close to us and toward everybody in general.

So, all the major points are there with respect to what are later discussed as the far-reaching attitudes of generosity, discipline, patience, joyful perseverance, which means not giving up and going all the way, mental stability, or concentration, and discriminating awareness, discriminating what is helpful from what is not helpful and discriminating what is reality from what is a projection of impossible things. These are all there in a very general way. When we look at the lam-rims, the graded stages of the path, we find these organized and developed in a much more formal way in Tibet. 

What we find in India is that the great master Atisha, who came about eight centuries after Nagarjuna and who was one of the great masters who brought Buddhism a second time to Tibet, organized a lot of this material according to the three scopes of motivation. We have these already here in this text: (1) aiming always to have precious human rebirths in all our lifetimes and making sure that we do so that we can continue on the path in the most conducive way, (2) aiming to get rid of uncontrollably recurring rebirth all together, and (3) aiming to become a Buddha in order to be of best benefit to others. Atisha organizes some of this material in that way. But actually, when we look closely at his text, A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, we see that he doesn’t really outline at all the first two aims of insuring that we have one of the better rebirths and gaining liberation from samsara; he just mentions them. I don’t know if that is because we can fill in all that material from this text, Nagarjuna’s Letter to a Friend.

What Atisha outlines in much more detail – something that we don’t have here in this text – are very specific details about how to develop love and compassion, taking the bodhisattva vows and putting those into practice, and then going further into tantra practice about how to generate causes for achieving the body of a Buddha, which involves visualization and so on, that will help us (along with all the other practices that we have outlined) to achieve not just the mind of a Buddha but also the body of a Buddha in a manner that is much more efficient than the manners in the sutra path. We’ll have more of that, more about the actual methods for doing that, in the next text that we study, this Letter of Practical Advice on Sutra and Tantra.

So, we have this text that we have been studying. We have successfully gone through the whole thing, and I hope that it has been of some benefit.

The text itself is on my website, so you can read it. There is an audio file, if you’d like to listen to me reading it out loud. All that material is there, and all the classes are there as well in audio form in case you have missed any or would like to repeat them. There were 73 classes that we covered the text in. So, we did it quite thoroughly. We can rejoice in that. It is very wonderful that we have had the opportunity to go through it in a thorough way like that, not just quickly and superficially.

So, today, to end our current series (after this, we’ll have a three-week break while I am on a lecture tour in the United States), I thought we would have a little bit of meditation to think about some of the important  points that Nagarjuna himself emphasized in the text. 

Behavioral Cause and Effect – Recognizing What Is Destructive Behavior, What Is Constructive Behavior

One of the very basic things that is so important in our spiritual practice is having a general belief in cause and effect. I’m not just talking about cause and effect in terms of kicking a ball and the ball goes flying in the direction that we kick it. I am not just talking about that physical level of cause and effect. Nor am I talking about the cause and effect of banging our foot against the table in the dark and our foot hurting as a result. These are more mechanical types of cause and effect sequences. More relevant to a spiritual path and to gaining liberation is the cause-and-effect relationship of our behavior – that acting in a destructive way produces suffering and unhappiness for ourselves. It may produce problems for others; it may not. There’s no guarantee of the effect it will have on others, but it will certainly have a negative effect on ourselves. And if we act constructively, it will have a positive effect on ourselves and bring happiness.

So, for that, we have to understand what we mean by destructive, and there are many ways to define that. We are not talking about violating the laws that some authority either in heaven or in the courts has made. That is not the type of ethical discipline that we are speaking about here – which involves judgment and guilt or innocence, etc. because we have broken the law and, basically, have been disobedient, so then, we need to be punished. We are not talking about that type of ethics. We are speaking about acting under the influence of the disturbing emotions, acting out of anger, hostility. 

Out of anger or hostility, we can physically hurt somebody, steal something or even kill somebody. We can say very nasty, cruel words or deceive others, cheat others with our words, cause division, or just in general, interrupt them because we don’t want them to accomplish what they are doing. We can do all sorts of nasty things. We can also think with a lot of anger, with revenge: “How can I get even with somebody who has hurt me?” There are many sorts of thoughts that we can have with anger, thinking over and over again how horrible it was how this other person acted toward me or toward others: “How can I get even? How can I hurt them back?” This type of thing causes a lot of suffering for ourselves in the future. It certainly causes us to have an unhappy state of mind while we are thinking in that way. But even if we take joy in hurting somebody, still, in the long term, that is going to bring unhappiness to us. It’s a negative state of mind.

We can also act out of greed and longing desire. We are greedy to have more and more, so we go out and steal, or we even kill others. We have such strong desires that we act like a street dog and just have sex with anybody that we meet. We don’t care whom we hurt. In the end, we hurt ourselves. We exercise no self-control with greed, attachment and desire. We can lie in order to get our way. We can cause division in order to get somebody else’s partner for ourselves. We can interrupt others because we want their attention for me, me, me. Also, we can think with a lot of greed and desire about how to get as much – or more – as some other person has. “How can I win?” – this type of obsessive thought that just produces more and more suffering.

We can act out of naivety. That is also very destructive – that we think it doesn’t matter, that there is no effect of hurting somebody or of using their things without permission. And even if we break it – so what? We can hide it, so then they think that we didn’t do it. Or we think that we can have unprotected sex – “I am immune; I’m never going to get sick,” or “I am never going to get hurt by this.” We can act out of naivety when we lie or when we interrupt others, wasting their time with blah, blah, blah – idle chatter – thinking that it doesn’t matter. We can also think in very naive ways.

All of this is very destructive. Underlying a lot of it is having no sense of moral self–dignity. We don’t have a sense of pride in ourselves that would make us think, “How can I act like that? I think more of myself than to act in such destructive ways just to act out my disturbing emotions and thoughts.” Also, what underlies it is having no sense of respecting others or how my behavior reflects on others – “I am supposedly following a spiritual path. What are others going to think of me? What are they going to think of the spiritual path that I am following? What are they going to think about my family? What are they going to think of people who come from my country?” In other words, we don’t live in isolation; what we do reflects on a larger group. And we just don’t care. This also is a foundation for acting in a destructive way. 

These are the types of things that will produce more and more problems for us in the future as our anger gets more and more imbedded and our greed, our longing desire, our lack of any self-control, and our naivety get repeated and repeated. It is just going to repeat more and more. 

There are many other types of disturbing emotions like indecision: “Should I do this? Should I do that?” Then, if we do anything, we think, “Well, the other thing would have been better.” We go back and forth, back and forth, and we become totally crippled and suffer. And the other persons suffers if the decision involves somebody else. We just don’t act and constantly torture ourselves with indecision. And this just repeats over and over again, and it will continue to repeat if we continue to indulge in it. 

Acting with Restraint and with the Thought to Help Others

So, this is what we need to think about in terms of our own attitudes toward these situations, toward cause and effect in terms of our behavior. If I restrain myself… in other words, what is basic constructive behavior? Basic constructive behavior is when the impulse arises to act on the basis of anger, jealousy, longing desire, greed or naivety or to keep going back and forth in indecision to say “no” and to exercise self-control and stop it. Don’t act on it. And we don’t act on it because we want to avoid the suffering that it would produce and that I myself will experience – not necessarily now but in the long term. These habits are just going to generate more and more torture. So, no! We exercise self-control. That’s ethical discipline. Restrain ourselves. 

Then, of course, there is a special type of constructive behavior, which is not just to refrain from doing something destructive but to do things that are on the basis of no hostility, no attachment, no expectations. We do things because we want to be helpful. We want to help others and to be of benefit to others. “I am not going to reject you if you don’t take my advice. I am not going to feel badly if it doesn’t work. I am not going to expect anything in return. In other words, I am not being nice just because I want to be loved or because I want to feel important. So, without any hostility if you don’t accept my help, without attachment and expectation that I’m going to get something back, and without naivety, thinking that just by what I do I’m going to save the world – I’m God…” Thinking that way is naive. It may help; it may not help. We’re not God.

So, to act with the wish to be of benefit, for others to be happy and to be able somehow to lessen their suffering, without having any of these disturbing emotions behind it – that’s constructive. It is very constructive. And maybe it will help others, but maybe not. There is no guarantee. So, that’s not really for certain. But what is certain is that my own state of mind will become more peaceful, more positive and happier in the long term.

This is the rock bottom foundation of the Buddhist practice. And it is very important to think about how much confidence we have in this. If we have confidence, if we believe that this is so and we see, even on a superficial level in our daily behavior, that this is so, then we develop the conviction that “I am going to live my life in accordance with that understanding.”

We can see in basic, everyday situations, that if I am in a relationship with somebody, and we’re in a highly emotional state in which we are both upset, and I start saying things… what do I do? I’m upset. I’m angry, and the other person is angry. We yell. We say cruel things. We say stupid things because we are so upset. What does it do afterwards? I feel terrible, and the other person feels terrible. It doesn’t solve the problem at all. In fact, it makes the problem worse, whereas, even if I am upset and the other person is upset, we say, “Look, this is not the time to discuss this. Time-out,” and we try to resolve things at a time when both of us are calm, we feel happier. We feel happier even if we have to say things that are not so nice, like, “Look, what you have been doing is not appropriate,” or whatever. If it’s done when we’re in a calm state with the wish to be helpful rather than being upset, we are happier. The other person is perhaps happier; but at least, we will have more peace of mind.  

If we are compulsively attracted with longing desire for other people and we act on that, it’s just going to produce more and more longing desire and more and more unsatisfactory relations with others. If we control ourselves at that time and don’t act on that longing desire, then, if we get into a relation with someone else, it can be on the basis of actual love and caring for the person. It’ll bring far more happiness than just an immediate gratification of longing desire, which never satisfies. So, we try to think of these things. 

Taking the Teachings Seriously and Being Mindful about Putting Them into Practice

If I am supposedly following a Buddhist spiritual path, how much do I actually believe what’s said about behavioral cause and effect to be true? How much do I really want to put that belief into my life? And how much do I try to do that – not on the basis of “I am afraid of burning in hell if I don’t do this,” not on the basis of “I want to please my teachers by being a good boy or girl,” but on the basis of actually (remember we had this in Shantideva’s text) caring about what happens to us in the future and caring about what effect we’ll have on others. How seriously do we take cause and effect in terms of our behavior?

Let us think about these things for a while. And if, at the end, we generate a feeling of “Yes, I believe,” then focus on the decision, “Yes, I am going to do that or, at least, try to do that as best as I can, try to remain mindful.” Remember the definition of mindfulness. It’s the mental glue with which to hold onto a cognitive object – so, to hold onto that understanding. It is the same word as to “remember.” I am going to try to hold onto that. And if I lose hold of that and forget it, I try to reestablish, try to remember, especially when I catch myself starting to act or having the impulse to act on the basis of a disturbing emotion. 

And it doesn’t have to be limited to physical actions or saying something stupid that we are going to regret later, but also getting into a mental loop, over and over again, of thoughts of revenge, over and over again, thoughts of longing desire, over and over again, thoughts of mental wavering back and forth – doubt: “This or that? This or that? What should I do?” Blah, blah, blah. We stop it, and say, ”No!”

Now, these thoughts are very strong, so the impulse is going to come up again and again. As Shantideva says, we need to regard that as our true enemy. This is what causes me unhappiness. “This is my enemy. I am not going to give in to this enemy.” Then we have to find weapons to oppose it. There’s a long list of other thoughts that we can use for thinking about the problems that these destructive thoughts will create, etc. 

Using Methods for Dealing with the Disturbing Emotions

Or we can use another type of method, which is a mantra. Mantra is to protect the mind. Instead of putting all this mental energy into these obsessive thoughts, you can use that energy for reciting a mantra. Better to have OM MANI PEME HUNG go through your head than “Oh, what this person said!” and blah, blah, blah. Instead, you recite OM MANI PEME HUNG. And OM MANI PEME HUNG is with a thought of compassion. This is a very helpful thing. That’s why the Sanskrit word “mantra” is explained as literally meaning something that protects the mind. It protects the mind from these loops of obsessive, disturbing thoughts that just repeat over and over again. 

And we need what is called renunciation, which is the willingness to give that up, based on being totally disgusted and bored with it. “This is boring!” Not that we are angry with ourselves – that is still a disturbed state of mind. We are just bored: “This is tiresome, boring. Come on already! What a colossal waste of time and energy. And enough!” So, like that. If we are not yet able to quiet our minds using concentration methods, at least we can find mantra to be helpful. 

So, there are many, many methods for dealing with the disturbing impulses, emotions and states of mind that come up. And we need to be mindful to apply whatever method we use on the basis of caring – “I care about what I experience. I take myself seriously and have enough respect for myself that I care about what I experience, what I feel.” That’s very, very important. Very basic, basic teachings.

OK? So, let us think about this for, let’s say, ten minutes.

[Pause]

Do you have any questions or comments to make?

Participant: I have a question. What is kundalini?

Dr. Berzin: The question, which is on a completely different topic, is what is kundalini. 

Kundalini is the name given in Hinduism to what is called chandali in Buddhist practice. It has to do with a practice in highest class of tantra – anuttarayoga tantra – dealing with the subtle energies of the subtle energy system. Within that context, in the central channel at the navel chakra (there are many chakras) there is the possibility of what’s called “lighting a…” it’s like lighting a fire. This is related to the practice called tummo (gtum-mo) in Tibetan – this inner heat – which is basically drawing the winds, the lower energies of the body, to the navel chakra. In doing that, it generates a certain heat within the central channel. From that point, the heat goes up the central channel and, in a sense, melts a certain other type of energy that is in the forehead chakra, sort of in the brain, as it were. That energy then falls down, or it melts down in the central channel and produces a very blissful state of mind that is conducive for getting the various energies in the body to go into the central channel and dissolve at the heart chakra to get to the subtlest level of mind, which is the most conducive level of mind for getting a non-conceptual cognition voidness in the most efficient way possible.

So, it is, in the Buddhist context, a very sophisticated practice that is very, very advanced and unbelievably difficult to do. I don’t know all the details of the Hindu version of it, but it undoubtedly has something quite similar to do with the energies within the central channel starting at the navel chakra. 

Any other, more relevant questions to what we were discussing? No? OK.

Then let us think about another topic that is a very important topic. It is only touched on briefly in Nagarjuna’s text, but another very fundamental thing in our practice of Buddhism is compassion, which His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks about all the time. 

Compassion

Compassion is defined as the wish for others to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, a wish that entails taking a certain level of responsibility to help them to overcome that suffering. It’s not just “Oh, dear, I wish somebody else would help them. I wish that they would be free of it.” It’s also that we are willing to help. That is something that can be very, very deep. We can not only wish for others to be free from the superficial, ordinary, everyday type of suffering of pain and unhappiness; we can also wish for them to be free from the suffering of what’s called the “suffering of change,” which is our ordinary type of happiness that never satisfies, is never enough and always changes into some unhappiness, and on an even deeper level, we can wish them to be free from the suffering of uncontrollably recurring rebirth, which is the basis for all this up and down. 

And what is known as great compassion is the equal wish for everybody to be free of suffering and its causes. When we say “everybody” in the Buddhist context, we mean every, every living being with a mind, a limited mind. So that’s a lot – including those who at present have taken rebirth as all the various insects in the universe. So we are talking about a lot of beings. And it is with the understanding that, basically, everybody wants to be happy, and nobody wants to be unhappy and that we are all equal in that wish. Therefore, our compassion is based on that understanding. It is not based on an irrational emotional state of “Oh, you poor thing!” – this type of emotional state, which is unstable and difficult to extend to everybody equally.

If our compassion is based on understanding and using methods such as putting ourselves in the other person’s place, we see that if we were in their situation – like being a homeless person having to beg on the subway (U-Bahn, we call it here in Germany) for enough money to get something to drink or eat – how horrible that would be. Here’s a human being. In fact, it could be my mother. Imagine if our mothers had to do this, let alone imagining we ourselves having to do this or our children having to do this. We see how awful that is and that this person is a human being or… this extends to animals, insects, everybody. They want to be happy; they want to be loved. They don’t want to be rejected, don’t want to be ignored, don’t want to be unhappy or looked down upon. That then is based on, or has as a support, respect, respect for everybody equally, and also the understanding that it is possible for them to overcome their problems and sufferings.

If it weren’t possible, all we could do would be to feel sorry for them and to try to make them perhaps a little bit comfortable. But in the end, we feel, “Well, there’s not very much that I can do.” Well, there might not be very much that we can do now in our situation; however, that doesn’t mean that, ultimately, this person can’t be liberated. Basically, they have to do it themselves through their own understanding. We can’t understand for another person; they have to understand themselves. We can’t force discipline on somebody else, and we can’t force others to be loving and considerate; they have to develop that themselves. But we can show the way, and we can help to provide conducive circumstances for that. 

Participant: Are plants and minerals considered sentient beings? 

Dr. Berzin: Are plants and minerals considered sentient beings and how do they fit into the bodhisattva path? From a Buddhist point of view, plants and minerals don’t have minds. 

You see, when we speak about suffering from a Buddhist point of view, we’re talking about a being with a mind that has intentions and who, based on a certain intention or disturbing emotion, wishes to act in a certain way, acts in a certain way, and then experiences the results of that action. A plant growing in the direction of the sun – that really isn’t an intentional act. It’s not that it thinks whether or not to do this and then decides to do it. So, a plant is not considered a being with a mind that would experience karma – the results of its decisions, basically. The same thing with minerals, rocks and so on. 

However, they are part of the path in the sense that our lives depend on these things. We need plant life. We need the minerals. We need the earth. Otherwise, we couldn’t grow anything, couldn’t walk on anything. We need the support of those things. Therefore, part of the bodhisattva path is not to destroy the environment. One of the bodhisattva vows is not to destroy or damage the… there it’s says cities, towns and countrysides, and it lists various things. But it refers to the environment. So, this is important. 

For monks and nuns, for instance, among those vows is not to mindlessly pick things. For example, people sometimes walk along and pick leaves off of plants or cut the flowers, which are just going to sit there and die. So, it’s not to act mindlessly and to waste the things that we have in nature; instead, it’s to respect those things as what supports life. But a plant is not actually a sentient being that one can teach the way to gain liberation from karma. So, this is the Buddhist point of view.

Also in various texts are explanations that beings with minds could be reborn in an animal form that looks like a plant. That’s possible. There are various animals in the sea – sea urchins or whatever – that look like plants. So, there are things like that. And Buddhism has a greater variety of things like that also. It’s not that common, but it happens. It happens.

So, compassion is an important topic. We don’t have so much time to actually do a meditation, but compassion is something to really try to incorporate into our lives and, as His Holiness says, to have it be based on understanding rather than on an overly emotional, upset state of mind. 

Now, that is an interesting topic to explore. And one can only start to understand it from experience, I think, because when we think of love and compassion… love is the complement of compassion. Just as compassion is the wish for others to be free from their suffering and the causes of suffering, love is the wish for them to have happiness and the causes for happiness.  And both of them are without regard to what the other person has done, whether to me or anybody else. That doesn’t matter. We are not judging. Everybody wants to be happy and to be free from unhappiness. And if they have acted in destructive ways, it is not because they are bad; it is not because they are disobedient. It is because they don’t know any better. They are basically ignorant – we would say “unaware” – of the consequences of what they do. Therefore, they are objects of compassion rather than objects of anger and judgment. 

So, it is a calmer emotional state. It can be a very deep emotional state, but it is not a disturbing emotional state of… well, it is hard to describe. Hard to describe. And in the beginning, when one tries to develop this type of love and compassion, it might seem rather artificial because one is, in a sense, creating it through a line of understanding or reasoning – “Everybody wants to be happy, nobody wants to be unhappy. We are all equal. So, just as I don’t want to be unhappy and I want to be happy….” With this type of line of reasoning, we try to put ourselves in the other person’s position. We can also think of how they could have been our mother, etc. There are many, many methods. 

But it may seem very artificial in the beginning, and it may not really move our hearts. But that doesn’t matter. Still, with that state of mind, we try to help the other person, or at least not look down on them, like if they are begging in the subway. At least give them a smile. It gets into the whole topic of generosity. Generosity doesn’t include just giving them money. It includes giving them a smile, giving them freedom from ignoring them or looking down at them or looking away because we can’t take it, and so on. A form of giving is to actually regard them as human beings, as suffering beings. That is very important in our attitude.

So, in the beginning, it might not be based on a very strong, what we would call feeling or emotion, but we just do it. Just do it. And we do it with the understanding that this is beneficial. It’s not that “I want to be a good boy or girl,” or “I want to be a good Buddhist.” That is not the motivation here. It’s that we know that it will be helpful for the other person and ultimately helpful for ourselves. 

As one gets more and more used to this and builds it up as a habit, slowly, there is what we in the West would call a “feeling” that underlies it and that it generates. But it is a very peaceful feeling; it is not disturbing feeling. And it’s a very deep type of feeling. I think the closest analogy that most people experience is the difference between falling in love and being almost crazy in love with another person and – after you have been in a partnership for a long, long time – having a very deep love for the other person. It is not this crazy type of love. I think that is a little bit of a taste of what the difference is here. This is what we want to aim for. This is something that is far more stable, far more long-lasting because the other type of love and compassion basically can change very, very quickly – if we are not in the right mood, if the other person does something that we don’t like, etc. It’s unstable. So, we want to develop a type of love and compassion that is deep, stable, based on understanding and that is very well integrated within us.

These are some basic teachings. And with that, I think to end this evening. This ends the series of talks on this very, very wonderful text, Letter to a Friend, by Nagarjuna.